Nauka

Quarterly NAUKA is the official scientific journal of the Polish Academy
of Sciences. The quarterly is publishing the reviewed original research
papers and reviews articles from various fields of science, as well as
articles devoted to the current problems concerning organization of
science and higher education. The journal is intended to the whole
scientific society and to all interested in recent problems of science
and higher education.

Abstrakt

In the Accession Treaty of 16 April 2003, Poland agreed to adopt euro as
its national currency, but the date of this adoption was not specified.
The financial crisis in several countries of the Eurozone, in response
to the world financial crisis in 2008, reduced drastically the public
support in Poland for the replacement of the zloty by the euro. This
article has two objectives. One is to assess the net costs, economic and
political, for Poland remaining long outside the Eurozone. In this
assessment the analysis includes also two official reports by National
Bank of Poland, the country’s central bank, published in 2009 and 2014.
The other objective is to note and assess the reforms which have been
undertaken by member states of the Eurozone in response to this crisis,
in order to maintain and enhance financial stability and economic
effectiveness of the rules adopted at the start of the Eurozone on 1
January 1999. The author suggests to consider and adopt additional
reforms. Discussed is also the USA experience with its own monetary
union, and the potential influence on policy developments in the EU of
increasing global competitive pressures from China and India.

Abstrakt

The text is written on the occasion of the centenary of the Faculty of
Law of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The author describes
the history of the Jubilarian, discusses the achievements of the
Faculty’s community and reveals some of its imperfections. The review
presents the changes which the Faculty has undergone. The authors
commentary is pervaded with the pride of he Faculty‘ s successes from
the articular periods of the history. The author also expresses concern
about the effects of the Polish higher education reform which is now in
its initial stage.

Abstrakt

The consciousness of a crisis of university inclines towards its
reformation. In the thinking about its revival it is necessary to take
into account the archetypical idea behind university, traditions to
date, contemporary conditions and visions of the future. It is also
getting indispensable to take into consideration such values that ought
to steer the development of university in the framework of global
civilization. The tasks of university are as follows: 1) to conduct
research in striving for truth in the conditions of autonomy and
freedom, as well as responsibility for the present day and the future of
man; 2) to educate students, which introduces them in the world of
science and life, as well as teaches them to be responsible; 3) to
practice public science which is present in debates undertaking to solve
vital social problems. The academic community and its elites should
defend the conception of university against the dictate of their
political and economic counterparts who attempt to impose the idea of an
entrepreneurial university which produces a utilitarian knowledge and
“human principles”.

Abstrakt

One of the main human goals is to achieve the state of happiness. Almost
all people ask themselves the question of how to attain this goal. For
thousands of years, philosophers and spiritual leaders and, nowadays,
researchers representing various disciplines of social sciences, have
been searching for the right answer to this question. One of the
dilemmas intertwined in the debate about the essence of happiness
relates to the tension expressed by the question “to be or to have”; the
tension between the spiritual and the material world; between sacrum and
profanum. Can accumulation of money and material possessions make us
happy? Starting with the message passed on by a German psychoanalyst
Erich Fromm in his essay “To Have or to Be” and the wisdom derived from
the classic philosophical and religious works, I will attempt to define
the relation between the state of happiness and the attachment to money
and possessions or the attachment to social and transcendent values.
This difficult, yet crucial, problem will be analyzed in the context of
the current psychological knowledge related to the emotional and
cognitive consequences of taking a materialistic approach to life. Erich
Fromm and other thinkers who had lived hundreds of years before him,
suggested that greed and pursuit of material possessions did not appease
the human longing for happiness. The latest experimental research,
conducted by psychologists, economists and scholars representing other
disciplines of science, seem to strongly confirm these assumptions.

Abstrakt

Basing on Polish experience of about 5 years (since the presence of the
African swine fever (ASF) in this country, starting from February 17th,
2014) and in accordance with literature the importance of the disease in
wild boar is charaterised. ASF belongs to the most dangerous, very
contagious diseases occurring in domestic swine and wild boar in
Eurasia. In Europe, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and
Belgium ASF is existing at present and was diagnosed for short time in
the frame of the Eurasian pandemy. There is a serious concern of
spreading of the virus of ASF (ASFV) to other countries of Europe, not
only by wild boar. However the reservoir of ASFV in this animal is
playing a very important role in the maintenance of the virus and
infection of pigs. Long lasting existence of ASFV in the environmnent is
connected with the very high resistance to antiviral environmental
factors. Following the lack of an effective immunogenic vaccine against
ASF the disease can only be controlled by administrative measures.
Additionally the important and recommended procedure is the significant
reduction of the wild boar population. Probability of eradication of
ASFV from wild boar is increased after adding quick carcass removal
simultaneously by respecting biosecurity rules. If effectively
implemented, fencing is more useful to delineating zones rather than
adding substantially to increased efficiency of ASF control. However,
segments of fencing will be particularly usefull in theses areas, where
carcasses removal or intensive hunting is difficult to implement.

Abstrakt

In 1949 the first book of the Atlas of Polish Traditional Costumes
series appeared. Józef Gajek was the one who initiated the series,
published by Polish Folk Association to this day. He was associated with
Polish Ethnographic Atlas, which had a great impact on the character of
the series. Its main objective was to describe Polish traditional
costumes according to particular regions. Janusz Kamocki and Barbara
Bazielich were subsequent editors of the series. Since 2011 the authors
of this article have been part of the editorial staff. At their
initiative ten more books of the series were published in the years
2013–2018, field research on traditional handicraft was conducted and
the Traditional Costume Section was established. The article describes
the circumstances accompanying this editorial series appearance and
discusses both main directions in research on traditional costumes and
activities for popularising knowledge of this unique cultural phenomenon.

Abstrakt

The article is an invitation to discuss the way of understanding human
development as an actualization of individual’s potential. I present two
opposite approaches to this particular problem: human development as
choosing preferable potentials and also as striving to actualization of,
in some way, every potential, especially these which concern the
uniqueness of an individual. In the following parts of the article I
locate the problem of human potential in three main discourses
regarding: 1) human nature and its origin, 2) the possibility of full
experience of individual lifespan 3) the possibility of influence
through people on the content and the form of their actualizing
potential. To the latter and strictly practical issue I pay most
attention. I formulate five thesis regarding this issue. They may, in my
opinion, be a starting point to discuss the general problem mentioned
above. Therefore, they encourage to think about the mechanism of human
development and the future environment of his life.

Abstrakt

This year we are celebrating 150 anniversary of the discovery of DNA by
Friedrich Miescher. His finding initiated a series of discoveries that
allowed to depicts life's most famous molecule with novel features with
considerable biological interest. In this article we recall the biggest
mile stones of 150-year history of DNA and present the context and
meaning of several key observations that have brought us closer to
understanding DNA. 150 years ago, people had no idea that DNA existed,
and they certainly hadn’t heard of DNA structure and sequencing. We now
know that DNA is a dynamic, tortuous coil, constantly shuffling and
unwinding. Today DNA is all around us, in a physical sense and in a
cultural sense. It is really part of our culture. We will discuss also
the little known facts, often overlooked in similar discussions. We will
focus particularly on Professor Richard Altmann's from Iława, whose
contribution to knowledge about nucleic acids is significant, although
not well recognized so far.

Abstrakt

Józefa Joteyko was the outstanding scientist in the end of the 19th and
in the beginning of the 20th century. Together with Maria
Skłodowska-Curie she was the most famous woman and scientist of Polish
origin in Europe. She was given the right to present her lectures in the
Collége de France and she was, after Adam Mickiewicz, the second Polish
lecturer at this great academy. She had committed her life to scientific
disciplines which included child neurology, neurophysiology, psychology
and pedagogy. She had managed to develop each of them evenly with the
same progress and in relation to children. Such approach was aimed at
understanding the child and gathering the knowledge about its character
and predisposition. These was also meant to help in determining what
kind of educational and professional way the child should take. The
present-day psychological and pedagogic clinics are the practical
fulfilment of Józefa Joteyko’s idea and we cannot imagine the
contemporary education without the support of such institutions.

Abstrakt

We discus legal status of plants obtained using NBT: whether they are to
be treated as GMOs or not. The conclusion may have a negative impact on
the development of research on them and their practical use. The problem
of the application of provisions on GMOs in relation to the products of
some of the NBT has been the subject of the decision of the Court of
Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Case C-528/16 – this topic is
analyzed in details.

Abstrakt

The aim of the article is to discuss Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona
in a philosophical context and analyze the problem of the identity of
the main characters. During the analysis, elements of existential
thought and Sartre's philosophy were used. The psychological and
philosophical layer of the film combines the common theme of broadly
understood existence. The focus was on the identity problems of the main
characters of the film and the linguistic layer in the context of the
interpersonal conflict.